International Congress of Arts and Science, Volume 1: Philosophy and Metaphysics
Philosophy
International Congress of Arts and Science, Volume 1: Philosophy and Metaphysics
Conference proceedings; Medicine -- Congresses; Science and the humanities -- Congresses; Technology -- Congresses
One thing is certain, we cannot go back to the old dogmatic standpoint,
whether rationalistic or sensualistic. In both cases dogmatism took for
granted that there is a real world of things which exist in themselves
independent of our subjective attitudes, and that our knowledge has to
give us a mirror picture of that self-dependent world. Sensualism
averred that we get this knowledge through our perceptions; rationalism,
that we get it by reasoning. The one asserted that experience gives us
the data which mere abstract reasoning can never supply; the other
asserted that our knowledge speaks of necessity which no mere perception
can find out. Our modern time has gone through the school of
philosophical criticism, and the dogmatic ideas have lost for us their
meaning. We know that the world which we think as independent cannot be
independent of the forms of our thinking, and that no science has
reference to any other world than the world which is determined by the
categories of our apperception. There cannot be anything more real than
the immediate pure experience, and if we seek the truth of knowledge, we
do not set out to discover something which is hidden behind our
experience, but we set out simply to make something out of our
experience which satisfies certain demands. Our immediate experience
does not contain an objective thing and a subjective picture of it, but
they are completely one and the same piece of experience. We have the
object of our immediate knowledge not in the double form of an outer
object independent of ourselves and an idea in us, but we have it as our
object there in the practical world before science for its special
purposes has broken up that bit of reality into the physical material
thing and the psychical content of consciousness. And if this doubleness
does not hold for the immediate reality of pure experience, it cannot
enter through that reshaping and reconstructing and connecting and
interpreting of pure experience which we call our knowledge. All that
science gives to us is just such an endlessly enlarged experience, of
which every particle remains objective and independent, inasmuch as it
is not in us as psychical individuals, while yet completely dependent
upon the forms of our subjective experience. The ideal of truth is thus
not to gain by reason or by observation ideas in ourselves which
correspond as well as possible to absolute things, but to reconstruct
the given experience in the service of certain purposes. Everything
which completely fulfills the purposes of this intentional
reconstruction is true.
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